Forget Saddam and Osama, this has been the week of The Sopranos in the US. The return of the television series about the dysfunctional New Jersey Mafia family has generated almost as much newsprint and debate as the possibility of a war with Iraq.

Coinciding with the return of the series have been a number of learned and not-so-learned books about the family, many of them seeking to deconstruct the series in cultural and political terms.

One volume, This Thing of Ours, Investigating the Sopranos, edited by English professor David Lavery, contains the observation on Tony Soprano's business relationships as being "characterised by a phallocentric, linear representation of self".

What a pleasure it would be to see Tony Soprano himself discussing this book, perhaps with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr Melfi. But one almost certain side effect of the renewed interest in the Sopranos will be renewed protests from Italian-American groups that they are being unfairly caricatured as immoral Mafiosi.

I recently saw in LA's Comedy Store a stand-up comedienne of Italian descent saying that it was untrue to suggest that all Italian-Americans were in the Mafia. "Not at all -some of them are on witness protection programmes," she said.

How the Italian-American groups must be looking in envy at the extraordinary success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the surprise movie hit of the summer, which has already grossed around $100m at the box office - far in excess of many Hollywood supposed blockbusters - despite being made for only a tiny sum.

This romantic comedy about a supposedly plain 30-year-old Greek-American woman, played by Nia Vardalos, finding love with a non-Greek man in Chicago portrays Greek-American family life as heart-warmingly genuine and real: they love to eat, they want their children to marry other Greeks and they are proud of their heritage since more or less every word in the English language is derived from Greek. And so on.

Hollywood pundits are now predicting similar treatments for other ethnicities as filmmakers seek to cash on the big, fat success they see before them. Stand by for Polish-American, German-American and Haitian-American versions.

Many ethnicities in the US have already found that films and television have been able to introduce their worlds to a wider American public. Mexican-American life has been portrayed most recently in television's American Family, Korean-American life explored by Margaret Cho in the Notorious CHO and I'm the One That I Want, Chinese-American life has also been brought to life on a number of recent occasions on screen.

But still some ethnicities do not seem to have received their full due. I was reminded of this by the book entitled How Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, a history professor at Georgetown university.

Most Scots may have been aware that one or more of their number invented the steam engine, the telephone, the fax machine, television, golf, philanthropy, whisky, modern economics, moral philosophy and discovered penicillin.

Alas, the Scots' one great weakness - a crippling modesty and self-effacement - has meant that most of the rest of the world is still unaware of this. The Victorian historian John Anthony Froude noted that "no people so few in number have scored so deep a mark in the world's history as the Scots have done".

But to find a modern American such as Professor Herman realising that "the Scots created the basic idea of modernity" is gratifying for dispassionate observers, who simply like to see accomplishments acknowledged.

Yet how has the entertainment business rewarded the gift of modernity so generously bestowed on them by the Scots? By the creation of a vulgar, drunken and offensive character called Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers films!

So when will there be either a television series about a Scottish-American family or a Big Fat Scots Wedding film to redress the balance?

You can just picture the opening scene - one of the children is working on inventing the telephone while his little brother plays with some mould and discovers penicillin as the bagpipes play over the opening titles.

Smart producers wanting to discuss how the series would progress can reach me at the usual email address. No timewasters, please.